The old say­ing "peo­ple in glass hous­es should nev­er throw stones" ap­plies in par­tic­u­lar to Op­po­si­tion Leader Dr Kei­th Row­ley's un­called for and puerile at­tack on the Gov­ern­ment for its de­ci­sion to go the state of emer­gency route. Row­ley seems to have con­ve­nient­ly for­got­ten that crime had its re­al launch when the PNM en­hanced the crim­i­nal el­e­ment with lunch­es for the so-called "com­mu­ni­ty lead­ers" (all now dead by as­sas­si­na­tion), al­lowed crim­i­nal el­e­ments to hi­jack Cepep, and in gen­er­al to per­pet­u­ate crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty through gangs.

The PNM Govt ap­point­ed a Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty of no use, re­ject­ed suc­cess­ful crime ex­perts such as Rudy Giu­liani and pan­dered on an on­go­ing ba­sis to a crim­i­nal el­e­ments by the non-ap­point­ment of an ef­fec­tive Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice. It fur­ther al­lowed the gangs to gain in strength while play­ing with ex­pen­sive blimps and us­ing se­cu­ri­ty bod­ies to spy on op­po­si­tion lead­ers as op­posed to crim­i­nals. When the pop­u­la­tion fi­nal­ly vot­ed the PP in­to of­fice, it in­her­it­ed an econ­o­my ru­ined by mis­man­age­ment, crim­i­nal gangs that be­lieved they were un­touch­able and a po­lice force in­fil­trat­ed by crim­i­nal el­e­ments, all cour­tesy the PNM. And all that time Row­ley was as qui­et as a mouse.

Ian Gi­anet­ti

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